I've been watching you for a long time, John
by ElliQuinn
Summary: How did Finch first become aware of Reese? One of my biggest questions from the whole show was how Finch came across the cold-blooded killer who was to become his great friend in the first place. This is, at last, my answer. And it's complete now!
1. Chapter 1

**For a long, long time I have wondered what the background was to Finch's reaction to the presence of Reese and Stanton in 316 ("RAM"). He had obviously had some previous encounter with them, and I was really, really hoping Season 5 would answer the question of how and where Finch first encountered Reese. This is my attempt to unravel how Finch first became aware of the man who was to become his friend and partner.**

 **Aragarna, this is for you, for providing the inspiration. I hope you like it.**

The first time the Machine sent Harold a number with nothing – absolutely nothing – attached to it, he simply had no idea what to do. He stared at it, taped to the glass notice board in lieu of a photograph. Frustration filled him, blotting out the normal background pain of his healing injuries. He turned his chair and pushed himself back over to the computer. Nothing at all. No name, no image, no bank accounts… uneasily he considered the possibility of a glitch, some mistake in the code. Far too late to fix now, and in any case his gut told him that there was no mistake. The person, whoever they were, existed. They just had… no identity. Which made no sense. Shaking his head, he picked up the paper cup with his lukewarm tea and took a sip, grimacing.

Several hours later he had made no further progress. The number simply didn't exist in any database he could access. He considered his options grumpily. It was two in the morning, his body was on fire, especially the hip, and he was nauseous with hunger. Time to stop and go home. Reluctantly he wheeled over to the exit, wrestled the mesh door closed, and placed his life yet again in the metaphorical hands of the creaking old elevator.

The next morning the Machine sent him a new number, that of an old lady in Queens with a lot of money and an impatient nephew. He put his mystery aside and instead spent the morning trying to find a way to derail the nephew's murder plot.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

John Reese sat sipping coffee in a café with Kara Stanton as they watched the local paramedics working on their guy. He was lying among the tables belonging to the café on the sidewalk opposite.

"Pfft," said Kara derisively. "Don't know why they're even bothering. That stuff's so fast, he was probably dead before he hit the ground. You do good work, John."

Reese gave a minute shrug at the compliment and sipped his coffee again, his face impassive.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

The second time the Machine sent a number with nothing attached, Harold glared at it, taped in magnificent isolation on the glass board. His fingers drummed a nervous rhythm on the arms of his wheelchair. It was two months after the last one. Maybe there _was_ a glitch, some bad code somewhere in the Machine… he ran a tired hand over his face and wheeled back over to the computer.

 _Nothing, not a thing in any database-_

 _In any database I can access… what about the ones I can't access?_

A small smile curved one corner of his mouth. _Of course, if I put my mind to it, that's a very short list…_ His fingers began to fly across the keyboard.

An hour later he had his answer. The number had been assigned to James Wilson, an employee of an import-export company dealing with agricultural machinery. Wilson's taxes were perfect and he was unmarried. He had no driver's licence, but his passport was used several times each month. No debts, no mortgages, no entanglements of any kind. Credit card barely used at all. A very strange pattern. Except that it was all explained by the place where Finch found all this information.

"You're a spy," he said aloud. "So why do I have your number?" A thought struck him. The other mystery number from two months ago – a connection between the two, perhaps? Not safe to stay in here much longer, but he had time for a quick peek. He called up the number and entered it.

Nathaniel Patterson, a currency trader. Travelled regularly between New York and London. Unmarried, perfect taxes, no entanglements personal or financial anywhere. Strange gaps in his financial transaction records. He took another look at Patterson's passport photo and froze. The good-looking man with the dark hair gazed back at him from the photo. James Wilson. Two identities, one person. Finch backed out of the CIA database. _Why is the Machine sending me the numbers of_ _a_ _sp_ _y_ _?_

He sat back in his chair. _But if he's working for the Government, he must be working on the Relevant side, surely?_ Even as the thoughts formed he smiled grimly at his own naivety. _Just like Nathan was_ _R_ _elevant, right?_

There was always the possibility that Wilson, or Patterson, or whoever he really was, was the victim. Maybe a colleague with a grudge? But he was forced to admit that Occam's Razor made it far more likely that the Machine wanted him to prevent whatever the man was involved in. He leaned forward again and began the painstaking comb through his more normal sources of information. Now he knew what to look for it was easier to find the elusive Wilson/Patterson. He seemed to flip-flop between different identities. In fact, Wilson and Patterson weren't even his favourites. He was John Reese, more often than not. But there were others: Max Peck, John Collingwood, Terrence Matthews. Tracing his convoluted trail across four continents was actually quite fun, Harold found. A logic puzzle.

Three hours later – though it felt more like thirty minutes – he had a fairly complete picture of Reese's movements for the last three years. He'd also noticed that his hotel reservations frequently coincided with those of a woman, Marion Martell. Or Eloise Quincy, or Kara Stanton. Probably a partner or handler or some such. This was confirmed when he found airport security camera footage which showed the couple: a dark-haired woman with a beautiful face and cold eyes; a tall man in a suit walking with her, thin-lipped. He felt a little shiver of pride at having worked it out. But what were they up to? _If I'd made the Machine an open system I could just ask it, of course._ But that was one decision he'd never regretted. Maybe the only one, though. Sighing a little, since it was getting late and the air was cooling, he ran an algorithm which matched Reese and Martell's presence in their various locations with the news of the day.

Good Lord. Every single place they visited was the scene of a violent crime or a mysterious death. Sometimes several. "They're killers," he said aloud. "Assassins." He went back to the day two months ago when the Machine had sent him Patterson's number. They'd been in New York. A couple of murders that day and the day after – a gang shooting in the Bronx and a domestic in Brooklyn. Unexplained deaths? The elderly lady in Queens (his mouth tightened in anger and grief). An otherwise healthy man who collapsed and died at a sidewalk café in Manhattan. Supposedly a brain aneurysm. Harold's eyes narrowed. His fingers flew over the keyboard and windows bloomed across the screens in front of him. Surveillance footage from the camera at the corner… ah! Yes, there they were – sitting at a table across the road, apparently unconcerned as another human being lay slumped on the ground only yards away from them. Harold stared at the image on the screen with loathing. He had tried to fight this thing, this side project of Nathan's – saving the irrelevant numbers. Even after his friend's death he had undertaken it out of guilt, trying to make some kind of expiation for his sins. But it was only now, looking at the relaxed posture of the couple out enjoying coffee on a summer morning and knowing it was a charade, a cover for something deep and dark and _evil_ – it was only now that he fully embraced what he was doing. Righteous anger blazed through him.

"You're never going to do this again," he whispered in a shaking voice. "You are _not_ going to be responsible for another number. You're not."

To be continued...


	2. Chapter 2

Reese tried once more to find a comfortable position in his coach-class seat. The woman in front of him had tilted her own seat back until her head was virtually in his lap, and the guy next to him was overflowing his space just a little bit. Two rows away an infant started a desultory cry as its mother tried desperately to quiet it.

He indulged himself in a little fantasy in which just once his cover was a billionaire businessman. Okay, maybe not a billionaire who might reasonably be expected to use his own jet, but at least someone who didn't have to travel in this state of misery. Kara, four rows in front and slightly to his left, was lying back with earphones on and dozing the flight away. He wondered what she was listening to. The teenage boy behind him shifted, his knees pressing into Reese's back for a moment and a waft of body odour coming his way.

Reese tried once more to lean back and imitate Kara's doze. He was getting a little tired of the Wilson identity. The guy sitting next to him really did sell tractors for a living, and he'd had to keep up his end of a conversation which was not only phenomenally boring but also threatened to blow his cover the longer it went on.

He slipped into a trance-like state, not dozing but at least somewhat divorced from the noises around him. After some indeterminate period of time he felt the change in motion and engine note which signalled the plane beginning its descent. Frankfurt-am-Main was spread out somewhere below, but this far from a window he couldn't see it and it was probably cloudy anyway. He dug around for his passport and prepared for the whole godawful process of shuffling off the plane, retrieving a bag from the carousel and entering another country.

A little later he was walking across the airport concourse a few yards behind Kara. He didn't even notice the surveillance camera staring blank-eyed at him.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

Finch wasn't pleased. He had spent half the night trying to figure out who Reese and Stanton might be targeting, with no luck whatever. They weren't even in the country. So as the sun began to make its way through the Library windows he turned his attention to other matters. For one thing, another number had come in – a little girl this time, which was likely to prove unbearably distressing if he couldn't figure out some means of getting the mother's unsavoury boyfriend out of the way, and fast. Which brought him to the other idea he'd had. Trying to help people remotely, so to speak, wasn't working. He needed a partner. Someone with the skills to intervene. Such people existed, he knew, and there were ways of reaching out to them.

He began carefully sifting through the Darknet. The trick was to find someone who wasn't law enforcement masquerading as a hit man. And also, someone who wasn't even more dangerous to him than the people he was trying to stop. It took until lunch time, by which time he'd been awake for thirty hours and really needed to sleep before putting any kind of plan into action.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

Reese ditched Kara after the mission was successfully completed. He walked a long way through the cool damp night air, found a bar and ordered a beer. German beer was fantastic. He had two or three, consumed silently once the bartender got the hint and retreated to the other end of the counter. Then he got up and went out again and kept walking. Street lights gleamed on wet cobbles. A church loomed out the night at him, and instinctively he crossed the road away from it. A few more turns of the narrow streets and he was in the Turkish part of town. A fast food joint was open, harsh white light spilling out onto the paving. A group of young men gathered outside it stopped talking as he approached and watched him as he went inside. The doner spit was turning and the place smelled good. He was hungry at last, and he ordered a lamb doner kebab to take away and Pepsi to go with. Back out the door with his food and the young men again stopped whatever they were talking about until he was past them. He wanted to reassure them that his German was patchy at best and his Turkish even worse, but there didn't seem much point. Just so long as they left him alone. _No more blood tonight, boys, I'm just not in the mood…_

He kept on walking. Whatever aggression might have been building in the little group behind him seemed to have leached away. Something in his body language maybe. Whatever. It didn't matter.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

The guy Finch found, the one who offered discreet services to resolve personal issues, didn't want to meet. Apparently emails and SMS messages were the way such things were usually handled, and of course he was just as concerned as Finch was with the possibility that he might be the victim of an FBI or NYPD sting. In the end Harold had to essentially bribe him with a sum so huge that the guy allowed greed to overcome fear and relented. The concourse of Grand Central Station was a venue which was open and impersonal enough to meet their needs, and so they met there during rush hour, falling in with one another and joining the stream of commuters heading for the main doors. The man, who called himself Eddy Bolton (Finch didn't have the heart to tell him just how transparent his alias was), was perfectly amenable to Finch's plan. They parted with mutual expressions of goodwill, and Finch retreated to the library to watch events unfold.

Latifah Collins was four years old. Her mother was a sad, defeated young woman who slept with Manny Vasquez in return for drugs and a roof over her head. Little Latifah was a sweet kid, though. Sweet enough to attract Manny's attention. He had plans for Latifah. When Finch had dug into the man's email and text conversations he had sat quite still for several minutes, unable to believe what he was reading. The mental images generated by Manny's descriptions of the possibilities offered by Latifah's presence in his apartment were nauseating. Harold might in general deplore violence, but in this instance he was almost hoping something would go wrong…

In the event it didn't. Bolton was able to procure and plant a brick of cocaine in the apartment, and then Harold phoned in a tip to the anonymous police hotline. Manny was arrested by the end of the day, and with the volume of child abuse images the police recovered from his computer, he wasn't coming anywhere near Latifah or her mother for a very long time. Harold was somewhat bemused by the abject sobs of Latifah's mother as Vasquez was hauled away, though.

To be continued...


	3. Chapter 3

They took a flight out of FRA the following evening. Reese got bumped up to First Class; he carefully avoided Kara's eye as he walked up the aisle past her. Otherwise the flight back to New York was uneventful. When they got there they got a message from Snow; there had been a delay in procuring documentation to get them into Tajikistan for their next mission. They could take a couple of days in New York. Just needed to be on a six-hour standby. In the meantime the Company was stashing them at the Coronet, so count your blessings, John. At that moment their cab pulled up outside the hotel and they both got out. Kara gave him an enigmatic smile and told him she'd meet him back there at eight that evening.

Thus dismissed he turned his coat collar up against the chilly fall breeze and walked away. Just for the hell of it he followed Kara, very carefully, once she emerged from the lobby. Only about four blocks, it turned out. She slipped in through the door of an exclusive day spa, shooting him a knowing smile over her shoulder to show she'd made him.

With most of a day to kill he let his feet do the thinking for a while, just walking aimlessly, then got a cab across the Queensboro Bridge. There was a rather sad little park there under the bridge with a single lonely park bench and a good view across the river. He sat down and gazed across at the part of the skyline where the Towers had once stood. Funny how the cityscape seemed to have healed. The skyline no longer seemed to have a gap in it, it had closed over the place where the Towers had been as though they had never existed. He thought again about that day. Screw meeting Jessica in the airport - the day the Towers came down, that was the day everything started to go wrong for him. If it had been just a few weeks later, once he was out of the Service, he probably would never have gone back. He tried to imagine what it would have been like, sailing the boat into a sunny harbour in the Caribbean and finding the pictures in some week-old newspaper. There would have been rage, all right. Grief, horror, a desire for revenge for sure. But somehow he doubted that it would have been visceral enough to propel him back into uniform.

Instead, watching it all go down in that hotel room, Jess as stunned as he was… he'd known right then and there that he had to go back. Had to stand with his buddies, his people, had to do something to get those bastards, and make sure it never happened again. And Jessica had even understood when he tried to explain all this to her. She had, he was sure of it. She was prepared to wait.

When he finally wrenched his gaze away from the skyscrapers gleaming across the river, he noticed movement around his feet. A little, brown, hopeful mouse was scuttling around on the ground. Fascinated, he watched it for a few moments, but as soon as he moved it whisked away out of sight.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

Finch had decided to call his CIA hit man Mr Reese, since it was by far the most common of his aliases. He had his system set to ping him if the man arrived back in New York, which it duly did one morning. Once he'd tracked them to the hotel where they were staying – and he was somewhat surprised by the money the CIA was evidently willing to spend on keeping its operatives in the manner to which they had become accustomed – he tracked the woman to a day spa where she was apparently going to spend much of the day, while the man trailed rather aimlessly around New York. When Mr Reese got to the park under the Queensboro bridge Harold watched him through the surveillance cam bolted to a light pole over on the roadside. It was much too far away from the park bench to see anything of the man, really. Just his outline, almost a silhouette, over towards the riverbank. He spent just over two hours sitting quite still, staring out across the river. Then he got up again, shook his coat into place on his shoulders and strode off to hail a cab to take him back over to Manhattan.

Two lines appeared between Finch's eyes. What had Reese been staring at for two hours? He went back to the start. It was a little hard to judge the exact angle of the man's head, but he tried to get at least a rough idea of what had been in his line of sight. After a few moments he realised: the site of the World Trade Centre. Had he lost someone there? For the first time Harold felt a twinge of curiosity about this cold-blooded killer. After all, every monster starts out somewhere, he thought. There was a time when even Hitler was an innocent child.

There hadn't been a number today, although with Reese and his partner in town there might well be one soon. In the mean time, Finch decided to have a little dig around and see what he could find about Mr Reese's past. Hmm… Mr Reese – mysteries – whoever had come up with that alias had certainly hit the nail on the head.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

The Tajikistan thing was moving very slowly, Snow told them that night over dinner. But in the meantime there was a job here in New York. He passed a yellow envelope across the table to Kara. Everything they needed was in it. How they did it was up to them, it just had to be done within forty-eight hours. Kara tucked the envelope into her purse and the conversation turned to indifferent matters: the foibles of colleagues and some bitching about the bureaucracy. Reese prodded his food around his plate and watched as Snow tucked into the crème brulee he always ordered if he got the opportunity.

After dinner Reese and Kara went up to their rooms. Kara obviously wanted to lure him into hers, but he avoided her gaze and instead slipped into his own room before she could say anything. He wondered briefly what the guy they were after had done to piss the Government off, but once he was undressed and in bed sleep came quickly.

The next morning Kara tapped at his door early and he opened up to her. She was already dressed and came into the room, businesslike and tapping the envelope against her fingers. He rubbed a hand through his hair and went to shower while she ranged around the room, touching this and inspecting that. He took his clothes with him and dressed in the tiny bathroom – the hotel was expensive, but their rooms weren't _that_ good. Seven minutes to shower, shave and dress, and he was out. Kara was sitting in the single armchair so he sat on the bed and leaned forward. Her perfume was tangy in his nostrils. She held the photographs in a fan in her hands and doled them out one at a time.

"Her name is Marie Donovan. She's a stripper working under the name of Cherri Cherry – geddit?'

Reese got it. "Why the hell are we killing a stripper?"

Kara shrugged. "Strippers see a lot of men. She's probably a courier." Seeing his look of disbelief she added, "You know how this works, John. It's a network. You cut enough threads, it falls apart." _Boy Scout,_ her eyes mocked.

They worked out the details. Marie, or Cherri, or whatever, worked out of a discreet club in the Upper West Side. It wouldn't be too hard to waylay her as she got out of work. Make it look like a mugging.

"Of course if you raped her, it'd add authenticity," said Kara thoughtfully.

He took a long slow breath, then said carefully, "No. The mugging and murder of a stripper will attract enough attention already. A rape is too splashy." _After all, the NYPD probably still has standards_ , he thought sourly.

"Mm. Not to mention leaving too much DNA," mused Kara. "You're right."

They settled a few other details, and then they were free for the rest of the day.

To be continued... providing a I get a few reviews out of you people! C'mon there! if you like it enough to follow (for which I thank you), surely you can give me a little stroke to my ego by posting a review? I mean, it's not _that_ bad a story is it? LOL - I hope I have made my point! (Just taking a leaf out of aficionada de libros's book here!)


	4. Chapter 4

Harold settled his laptop awkwardly across his knees. Having already been rummaging around in the CIA's archives only a few weeks ago, he was a little chary of going in again. Changing physical location to a busy park was a routine precaution. He planned his hack meticulously. The last one had been a stealthy burglary; this was more like a smash-and-grab raid…

Having burrowed through the firewalls he was in and out in two minutes with the information he needed. He packed his laptop away again and wheeled himself along a shaded path to where his car was waiting for him.

He was waylaid, though, by a payphone ringing. Sighing a little, he noted down the coded words and resumed his journey back to where his driver was waiting patiently, propped against the car.

Back at the Library he put aside the problem of Mr Reese and set about finding the books which would give him the number. A stripper; that was a new one. She did private shows, he was bemused to see, and had her own website to tout her services. But mostly she worked out of the somewhat unoriginally-named Pink Pussycat Club. A disgruntled former client, perhaps? Usually sex workers were victims of fairly spontaneous acts of violence. Someone targeting a specific woman must therefore know her. He set about trying to compile a list of clients who might have motive to want her dead.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

Reese went for a run about sunset. He jogged along the paths in Central Park, enjoying the prickle of sweat on his back and chest, dodging other runners and dog walkers. Towards the end of his circuit he began to push himself harder, building in some sprints, getting the pulse rate up. He was gasping, heart hammering when he finally began his warmdown and at last came to a halt, flopping onto some grass under a tree. It was twilight and the surrounding buildings towered up, stark against a pale blue sky, the lights in their windows turning the emerging stars into dull pinpricks.

Reese lay there, gazing up at the sky, enjoying the golden glow of recovery as his sweat cooled on his skin and the blue of the sky turned duskier, and changed gradually to purple and then black. He picked himself up and went to shower and prepare for the night's work.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

Harold found that Cherri's client list was small but elite. Two councilmen, a congressman and his wife (Finch's eyebrows rose a little), even a senator. Several wealthy entrepreneurs, too. It seemed fairly clear that any of those might be a threat – unless of course Cherri herself was planning something. He stared in frustration at the screens. The only way, really, was to t ail the woman and hope to be present when something happened. Slightly reluctantly he reached for the burner phone he used to contact Mr Bolton.

"Mr Bolton? I have a job for you..."

POI*POI*POI*POI*

It was 2 am as Reese sat patiently in the car with Kara. They were parked across the street from the vehicle accessway which went down the side of the Pink Pussycat's premises, a nice old house on a tree-lined street - not that you could tell really in the dark. There were only a few street lights – one in front of the house and a couple more further along the road. He checked his phone again for the photo of Cherri, refreshing his memory of what she looked like. Not that he needed it. Wholesome, cheer-leader good looks – she projected the image of a sweet kid. Natural ash-blonde hair which niggled at something in his memory. Frank, amused eyes and a slightly snub nose. Admittedly, in her line of work that innocence was almost certainly fake, but still… he felt suddenly jaded and cynical.

Next to him Kara stirred. "Here she comes. Showtime, John."

Cherri was walking down the driveway from the rear entrance she had l come out of. She had her phone out sending a text message or something, but as she emerged on to the street she finished and put it away again.

He checked his Ka-Bar, razor-sharp in its leather sheath, and got quietly out of the car. Kara emerged on the other side. She crossed the road to where Cherri was walking under the street light. "Excuse me! Excuse me, can you help me? I lost my way..."

The woman paused and turned towards her, just as another shadow detached itself from a tree and lunged towards Kara. She turned with her usual grace and speed and jabbed a knee at the man's groin; he pivoted on one heel and avoided the blow, aiming an elbow at the side of her head. It made a glancing contact, which was enough to slow Kara down. He got an arm across her throat and tried to haul her away, out of the glow of the street light. Reese ignored them. Kara would gain the upper hand in maybe two minutes, or at the very least hold her own until he was done with the woman in front of him. Cherri was standing confused by the struggle, just registering that now might be a good time to run. She turned to go, but her ridiculous high heels meant she only got a couple of yards before Reese caught her. The knife was out and he slid it in under her ribs, a good solid stab right into her heart. She twitched and sighed and died in his arms and as the light caught her for just a second he could swear it was Jessica. He let go, horrified, and yanked the knife out and a gush of blood followed and there he was standing at the edge of the patch of street light with Jess dead at his feet and her blood on his hands. There was a sudden surge of bile in his throat and he stood gasping and gagging.

Kara was still dealing with the other guy, whoever he was. Reese put a hand up to his face and saw the blood on it and flinched away from it. This time he completely lost control of his stomach and threw up next to the light pole. Straightening up, he glanced again at Cherri in her pool of blood. Apart from her hair colour, which was exactly like Jess's, there wasn't much likeness, he reassured himself. Just a trick of the light. He wiped the Ka-Bar on his sleeve and turned towards Kara, just as her guy broke away and ran off down the street.

"Got her?" came her voice.

"Yup," he replied while he got control of his own voice again. Kara emerged from the shadows under the tree and joined him. She flicked an eyebrow at the puddle of vomit and smirked at him.

"Hey, the pavement pizza isn't mine," he said, adopting a light tone as he bent and took Cherri Cherry's bag and cell phone. _Cherri Cherry, not Jessica, not Jessica..._

"Then let's get out of here," Kara replied. They turned and walked over to where their car awaited, its doors still standing open.

Up above, the street cam stared down at it all.

To be continued...


	5. Chapter 5

"I don't care how much you want to pay me, I'm outta here! That guy just walked up to her and stabbed her while I was trying to deal with his crazy girlfriend."

It was half past two in the morning, and Harold's partner was almost stammering with rage. Finch tried to placate him. "Mr Bolton, I'm sure we can come to come kind of-"

"Hell, no. I know Government when I see them. You keep doing this, you're gonna piss off some very powerful people. You can keep your nutball scheme, I'm gone." The phone cut off abruptly, and when Harold took a look it was stationary on the edge of George Washington Park – in a trash can, he suspected.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

They dropped the car at a valet service – really an Agency front – to be sanitised, and then got a taxi back to the Coronet. By the time reports had been written and emailed in it was getting light; only twenty minutes until the hotel started serving breakfast. Reese took the chance to shower again. He wasn't a literary guy by any means, but a line from high school Shakespeare kept running through his head - "Can all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hands?" It wasn't Jessica, he told himself firmly. Just a woman with the same colour hair. _Jessica is alive and well and married to Peter Arndt. Happy. Protected. Snap out of it._ But he still felt the nausea rising whenever he thought of the scene under the street light. So he shut it off in a box somewhere in the back recesses of his mind, turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. _  
_

He dried off and dressed and went and found Kara downstairs helping herself from the breakfast buffet. He joined her, and they sat together, lazy and relaxed. He was just contemplating whether to get a second cup of coffee, or stop at one in the hope he could catch up on some sleep during the day when Mark arrived bearing his own breakfast: ham croissant and OJ.

"Good work," he said to them. "Though there was a street cam up on the light pole – didn't you notice?"

"Shit," said Kara. She frowned at Reese. He frowned right back. _Not my fault_ , he thought at her.

Snow waved a hand. "Don't worry. It'll be dealt with by day's end. No comebacks." He lifted a forkful of cheese and pastry to his mouth. "You did the Agency a big favour last night."

"Oh?" said Reese. Snow in a forthcoming mood was an opportunity not to be missed.

"Yeah. Your stripper was banging Senator Cranston. Who was causing us a world of grief on the Senate Intelligence Committee. So we do him a little favour." Snow took a sip of orange juice. "All good now."

Reese's gut lurched. He decided to have some more coffee after all. Something to wash away the taste in his mouth.

"You feeling okay, John?" asked Snow. "You look a little pale."

"Something I ate, I guess," he said.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

It was only in the morning that Harold could bring himself to take a look at the camera footage of Cherri Cherry's killing. He was quite prepared for the sight of Mr Reese and his partner waylaying their victim – as prepared as anyone can be for the sight of a cold-blooded murder, anyway. He raised his brows at how careless Reese and Stanton had been in failing to disable the camera, though it was newly-installed. Perhaps they had simply been unaware of its presence. But the reaction of the man after the killing _did_ surprise him. Reese dropped his victim as though stung, raised a trembling hand to his face and then bent and vomited. The street light had caught his face quite plainly in the camera's view. The man was distraught. Finch ran and reran the clip over and over again. He studied Reese's face, his body language – there was simply no mistaking it. For a moment the mask of the killer had slipped. _You're human,_ thought Finch.

Harold spent rest of the morning digging into Reese's past. He was quite surprised at how easy it was to find the documents he was after, and it took only a couple of hours to piece together the man's history. The hero father, the family tragedy of his death. Troubled high school career, culminating in an unprovoked assault in a bar, though Harold couldn't help wondering if there was more to that than met the eye. The Army. Peacekeeping in Bosnia, Ranger training and finally Delta. Only one small blip: in 2001 he'd been about to leave the Service when the Towers came down and he'd reupped instead. A couple of years later he'd joined the CIA.

Finch frowned to himself. Everyone knew exactly where they'd been when they'd first learned of the 9/11 atrocity; he'd been in a windowless room in a sub-basement at IFT's headquarters working on something when Nathan had stumbled in in the evening and told him. Where had Mr Reese been?

On leave, it turned out, and again he found the information just tumbled into his hands. In Mexico. With a woman. His fingers tapped faster. Jessica Menzies, she'd signed herself at the hotel. Almost unbidden her marriage certificate popped up: Jessica Arndt, now. He glanced at the webcam. "I know you're helping," he said mildly. "So what is it you want me to see?"

Security footage from an airport sprang to life in a new window on the left-hand screen. The audio was atrocious and slightly out of step with the video, but it was possible to catch most of what was said. An airport concourse. Jessica. Reese. The awkward body language of former lovers.

"In the end, you're all alone. And no-one's coming to save ya," the man said and tried to walk away.

The woman stopped him. More words exchanged, then "Tell me to wait for you. Say those words, and I will." The sadness in the man's eyes as he waited silently until she walked away.

Finch could see his lips move, but he couldn't quite figure out what the man was whispering.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

The paperwork for Tajikistan came through later that morning. Reese swung through the doors of the Coronet feeling a weight lifting off his shoulders with every step away. He wouldn't mind if it was a long, long time before he returned to New York. The place never did him much good.

As he sat in the taxi out to the airport he found himself reliving those moments under the street light. He could tell himself all he liked that it didn't matter because the woman wasn't Jess. But he knew in his heart that she was someone's daughter. Someone's sister, maybe. Perhaps there was someone to whom she meant as much as Jess had to him. And he had ended her. She wasn't a traitor. She had died because someone had pointed him at her like a weapon and pulled a trigger in the form of a yellow envelope with some pictures in it. His lips tightened as he swore to himself that he would never again be just a weapon in the hand of some faceless power. Never.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

Harold shut down the window showing the meeting in the airport. Why the Machine was steering him towards this man was a mystery. Sad past or not, he was part of the problem, not the solution. With Bolton gone, Harold needed to find someone else. He called up some of the other promising profiles he'd located when he had first gone searching and found Bolton. This Dillinger fellow, perhaps...

The end (of this story, anyhow...)


End file.
